Monsieur Calicot: French Masculinity between Commerce and Honor

Abstract

This article argues that the figure of the calicot, a cloth salesman who became ubiquitous in nineteenth-century French literature and visual culture, crystallized social anxieties surrounding both class mobility and gender fluidity. Tracing the emergence of the caricatured calicot in relation to textile history and a burgeoning mass culture, the article investigates the meanings of the ridicule heaped upon this cultural type in both print and images and articulates a shift in the construction of masculine honor from battlefield prowess to commercial success. At once effeminate and dangerously seductive, the calicot as commercial fop became the site of unease within the rapidly shifting social landscape of Restoration France (1815–30). But by the Second Empire (1852–70), as the mixing of social classes became more widely accepted, and as the fashion economy became more democratized, the calicot faded as a target of satire and was transformed into a deeply ambivalent figure of modernity.